


katabasis

by therm0dynamics



Category: In Bruges, True Detective
Genre: (so much angst), Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Backstory, Angst, Character Study, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-07
Updated: 2015-07-07
Packaged: 2018-04-08 02:57:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4288158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therm0dynamics/pseuds/therm0dynamics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>katabasis (noun): a journey to the underworld.</p><p>an alternate backstory for ray velcoro; or, what happens after (fucking) bruges.</p>
            </blockquote>





	katabasis

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【翻译】katabasis溃败 by therm0dynamics](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9637154) by [liangdeyu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liangdeyu/pseuds/liangdeyu)



Ray knows he's alive when he opens his eyes and feels himself floating in warmth and comfort, surrounded by a wash of soft white light. He's alive. He’s in the hospital. 

Anyone else, Ray supposes, would have assumed they'd fucked right off to heaven, being greeted with something like that upon awakening. But heaven, paradise, whatever, it just isn't in the picture for him, not anymore. Not after London, and not after Bruges.

And suddenly, everything that’s happened hits him like a sucker punch to the gut. 

He remembers how cold he’d felt, lying face-down in the freshly fallen snow while his blood slicked up the cobblestone streets of fairytale fucking Bruges. He remembers Jimmy the dwarf and Harry Waters and Ken and the priest and the little boy, their faces flickering through his mind like snippets of a macabre film.

Mostly, he remembers how desperately afraid he’d been to die, because dying would’ve meant wandering the streets of that _fucking_ city for the rest of time with their blood dripping from his hands. He had been a fucking idiot to think that being alive would feel any better, as each labored stroke of his heart still flutters with fear and each breath he takes reminds him _you’re alive, they’re dead._  

But, he supposes, it’s just as much as he deserves.

\--

 _Hell is other people_ _,_ Ken had said to him once at three in the morning, five and a half hours into a stakeout on one of Ken's targets. He'd meant it about Ray at the time, who’d simply been reiterating to Ken, for the nine-hundred-sixteenth time, how _boring_ stakeouts were.

 _No Exit. Sartre,_  Ken had followed up rather needlessly, because Ray didn't  _care_  about existentialism or whatever the fuck, especially when it came from some hoity-toity French fucking cunt, but Ken had tried his best to educate him anyway.

Ray hadn't understood what Ken had meant at the time, and he'd quickly forgotten about it. But now, lying in this hospital bed in _fucking_ Bruges, some inkling of understanding begins to gnaw at the back of his mind. And it was just like Ken, that was, wasn't it. To have the last word, even in death. Ken had always looked out for Ray, like a perpetually touchy and scowling older brother, scattering little tidbits of affection and wisdom here and there like throwing breadcrumbs to pigeons, or like dropping a handful of coins out a belfry window – ah,  _fuck_.

No, no,  _no_.

\--

After a few more days mainly spent sleeping and hopped up on drugs, Ray manages to sit up by himself. His entire body screams as a wave of white-hot pain lances through him, leaving him breathless and sobbing.

He understands very little of what the doctor says to him. The diminutive man goes on and on about what kind of mess he'd been when he'd been scraped off the operating table, about where the "booleets" had "heet" and whatever the fuck. Nope. He still couldn’t understand the fucking accent.

The dour-faced nurse in charge of his care speaks slightly more comprehensible English, and after a certain amount of wheedling and charming, she tells Ray that he'd miraculously survived three through-and-through bullet hits, been out for a week, semi-conscious for another week, and no, at no point had “the world’s most gorgeous blonde girl with beautiful blue eyes and a cute smile” stopped by to visit him.

Ray's stomach churns at that, but mixed in with the disappointment is overwhelming relief, because he can still remember how stricken Chloe had looked, fucking screaming and crying over him as the paramedics put the oxygen mask on and loaded him onto the gurney.

Chloe had been so sweet and so kind to him. She hadn't stood him up at dinner even though he’d entirely expected her to, hadn't yelled at him for stealing her drugs and half-blinding her ex-boyfriend-slash-partner-in-crime, had bailed him out of jail even, had kissed him under the Christmas lights of that fairytale fucking city. Yeah. No. Chloe didn't fucking deserve scum like him.

Because everything Ray touched was inevitably fucked, wasn't it, and Chloe wasn’t going to be the next name in that book of names he’s started keeping in his mind, following Jimmy and Harry Waters and Ken and the priest and the nameless little boy. She  _wasn’t_.

She doesn’t deserve that.

\--

Ray decides, in the end, to do what Ken had told him to do when he’d tried to put Ray on that train out of Belgium. _Go away somewhere, get out of this business, and try to do something good._

He starts by getting the fuck out of Bruges. He’s got a promise to keep to the parents of a dead little boy.

Long before the doctor deems it "medeecally adveesible," Ray checks himself out of the hospital with nothing but the clothes on his back and a small bottle of painkillers to claim as his in the world. He picks an orderly's pocket on his way out, helps himself to fifty euro, and buys himself a train ticket back to London. 

As he wanders the streets of London, he realizes he has no idea where he’s supposed to go. He’d known nothing about that little boy, not even his name. Instead of finding what he’s looking for, something’s following him instead. Everywhere he goes, he swears he sees a child’s figure hovering just in the edges of his vision, hears a taunting young laugh floating from just around the corner and the patter of small footsteps on the pavement.

Moving around is getting difficult, and every inch of his body is on fire. He decides that there’s no use surviving Bruges only to keel over and die in a gutter in London. Judgment will have to wait. 

By the time he breaks back into his old flat, he’s choking for breath and fighting back tears of agony. He downs the rest of his painkillers, passes out into a fitful sleep, and wakes up with a sticky wetness blossoming on his shirt. When he strips to change his bandages, he sees his wounds for the first time. There are three inflamed, gaping holes in his back and three matching ones on his torso, two in his belly and one a little higher up, just below his ribcage. The nurse had said he’d cheated death by mere millimeters.

Suddenly, he recalls that painting in the museum Ken had dragged him to, the creepily entrancing one with the writhing human figures being tortured and impaled and flayed alive by a host of tar-black, carapaced demons. He’d stared at it for the better part of an hour.

 _The Last Judgment. Hieronymus Bosch_ , the memory of Ken’s voice helpfully supplies. 

When Ray squints into the mirror, he can almost imagine that his wounds are the talon marks of some demon that’d latched onto him. And the more he imagines it, the more tangible the presence becomes, until he realizes that, Jesus _fuck_ , it’s very real. Call it what he will – guilt, sorrow, a ghost, a demon – he’s going to be carrying it around for the rest of his life.

 _Go away somewhere_ , Ken had said. London still doesn’t seem far away enough. 

\--

In the morning he spreads open a map of the world on his kitchen table, closes his eyes, and prods his finger down at random. The first three times he lands in the middle of an ocean, but the fourth, he lands in the vicinity of Los Angeles. 

He doesn’t consider it for long. Los Angeles is a place he knows fuck-all about, which is just fine by him. It’s perfect, actually. It’s about the furthest place from London and _fucking_ Bruges that he can get in the English-speaking world, excepting Australia, because fuck Australia. And if he never sees snow or cobblestone streets ever again, all the better. In exchange, he’d only have to deal with a few Yankee fuckin’ cunts. But these days, the Yankee fuckin’ cunts were everywhere, anyway. He wonders about that fat fuck who’d had the heart attack in the Bruges belfry. Wondered if the guy had made it out of the city alive in the end.

At least that one’s not his fault, Ray thinks. He did try to warn the guy.

But what about – what about Jimmy and what about Ken –

He goes to fold the map away and numbly notes how badly his hands shake.

\-- 

Slowly, Ray begins collecting every favor he’s owed from his days working for Harry. The priest job might’ve been Ray’s first _hit-_ hit, sure, but he’d served as getaway driver and decoy and lookout and dumb muscle enough times to have accumulated _some_ loyalty among London’s criminal underground, thank you very much.

He ends up with twenty thousand dollars cash, a plane ticket, and a new identity. 

He keeps his first name, whether out of sentiment or self-punishment or pure laziness he doesn’t know. His new last name, he picks by arbitrarily poking his finger into a phone book. He drops his accent, practices rolling the hard Rs and flat vowels around his mouth. He tells nobody where he’s going.

Ray Velcoro steps off the plane in Los Angeles and into a soft breeze and comfortable warmth and white sunlight. He has a split-second flashback to snowfall and hospital lighting and the smell of disinfectant, and then blinks himself awake. He’s still alive. It’s still not heaven.

\--

He rents the cheapest flat he can find – a _house_ , they call it here – in a neighborhood that’s not quite in Los Angeles proper. It sits just south of the perpetually dried-up river that winds through the city. Permanent residential population, ninety-three – ninety-four now, he supposes.

The town of Vinci, California, is a shithole. Ray’s said that about many places in the past, but he’s never meant it more than now. The town is pavement and storage yards and echoing warehouses, alive with a machine’s chugging heartbeat by day and a graveyard by night. Toxic waste seethes over the tangle of concrete channels, and factories belch tar-scented smoke high into the desert sky.

It’s land so fucked up that even someone like Ray, trying his worst, couldn’t possibly make things any worse. If Judgment Day were to happen anywhere, he thinks, it would be in this bleached-out wasteland where nothing green grows.

He almost smiles. This is it. This is the world he deserves.

\--

And it’s such a fucking cliché, but when he manages to get to sleep, which he barely does most nights, he has these _dreams_. Sometimes he’s back in Bruges, sometimes it’s London or Dublin or some dark place with cobblestone streets or some nameless field covered in snow. Always there are bodies piled up and rotting around him. Men and women and little kids. And always he’s covered in blood – not his own – because he _knows_ he’s the one that killed them. _Hell is other people_ , Ken’s there to remind him, over and over and over again.

He usually wakes up wanting to scream, but with that demonic weight sitting on his chest, crushing his ribcage against his spine, he’s paralyzed.

\-- 

There’s still the question of what he’s going to _do_ with the rest of his miserable fucking existence, because even with a shithole flat – house – in this shithole town, living on canned food and breakfast cereal, twenty thousand dollars only goes so far. 

He pokes around and learns of a few local crooks operating in the area. Mostly carjackers, gunrunners, drug dealers. The usual. There’s a bizarre nutcase everyone calls Billy the Psycho operating some dognapping ring out of West Hollywood, which Ray, for the life of him, cannot wrap his head around. Then, of course, there are the sharks in the guppy pond – here it’s some guy named Frank Semyon. Nobody’s certain about what this guy does _exactly_ , though the implication is to steer well clear of him.

But these are exactly the answers he doesn’t want. Ken’s voice nags at him nightly: _get out of this business, and try and do something good_. _Save the next little boy._ Ray’s through with all this shit.

Problem is, Ray isn’t good at much. He can run and climb like a motherfucker, especially when chasing or being chased. He’s a hell of a getaway driver. He can follow orders when he needs to, really he can. Though he’s got the charming, wide-eyed look of a little kid, with what Harry Waters had once called an “endearing fuckin’ countenance,” he can more than hold his own in a bar brawl. He can pick almost any lock and strip a handgun in under a minute. He can kill. 

But nobody with that particular set of skills had ever done anything good, could never _save_ anyone –

 _Oh_.

\--

How the fuck the state of California sees fit to let someone like Ray into the police academy, he’ll never know. But half a year after getting out of Bruges, his streak of criminally good luck is still holding out.

In fact, in the universe’s sickest twist of irony, police work is apparently something he was meant for. Finally, for maybe the first time in his life, he has an opportunity to truly focus on something. He’d never been a stellar student, but he latches on to the punishing physical training and endless classes as a distraction from his constant edginess and the flashbacks and the fucking _dreams_.

For the six months he’s in the academy, he finishes each day so exhausted that he falls asleep immediately and stays that way, sleeping like the dead, until his 5 a.m. wake-up call.

The instructors note how hard he works, and, mistaking his determination to find nightly oblivion for diligence and dedication, passes him with flying colors – even his firearms proficiency exam. Considering how badly his hands shake when he tries to do anything else, he’s completely steady and still when he has a gun in his hand. The thought should scare him, but he’s stopped really feeling fear. Or any other emotions anymore, really. That thought should _also_ scare him, but – you know.

\--

He becomes a sheriff’s deputy with the LAPD and throws himself into the work, patrolling long hours and taking dangerous investigations.

Some days are bad, and he sees Ken in the rearview mirror of his cruiser, shaking his head and scowling. Sees Harry Waters glowering at him from the shadows. Feels the cold breath of a little boy on the back of his neck, making him shiver in the dry desert heat. But as time marches by and years bleed away, the bad days become less and less.

He develops a reputation as a solid, dependable officer, if a little antisocial and touchy about being asked personal questions. The only complaint he ever gets is for beating a child molester half to death during an arrest, but that’s forgiven in light of the circumstances. Whatever other faults he has, he makes up for with sheer work ethic and determination.

One day around the three-year mark, Ken, who’s set up permanent residence in Ray’s headspace, says out of nowhere, _you did good, Ray, I’m impressed_. Ray isn’t one for self-reflection, usually, but he spares a moment to give himself a good hard look in the mirror during his morning shave, and he smiles when he realizes what he’s done. Sometimes Ray can almost forget that Bruges had ever happened at all. It's his greatest victory.

He still doesn’t dare call it happiness, but it’s – it’s alright. He’s alright.

\-- 

Sometime around the five-year mark, he meets a girl while off-duty in a bar.

From the moment they start talking, Ray knows that Alicia knows who he is. He knows she can see right through his bullshit and charm and witty one-liners and wide-eyed smiles. There’s something like pity in her eyes when she looks at him, but also something like understanding. It’s hard not to think about Chloe, but the difference is that Alicia is real and present and here and now.

Three months after they meet, he takes a leap of faith, pries open that locked-away part of him, and tells her everything about London and Bruges. Tells her about his book of names, about Ken, Harry Waters, Jimmy the dwarf, the priest and the little boy. He doesn’t even notice, that, midway through, he’s slipped back into his Dublin brogue, or that he’s started crying.

And by the end, all Ray can feel is relief, because he’d been so alone for so long. There was only one other person who could even come _close_ to understanding who Ray had been and how hard he’d worked to _not_ be that man. And that person had already returned dust to dust into the soil of his hometown in Ireland and his ghost was living in Ray’s head – so.

 _Please don’t call the police_ , Ray jokes weakly, to break the interminable silence. And then Alicia says, _what are you going to do, arrest yourself_? It’s an awful joke, but Ray laughs and laughs and laughs because he knows it’s okay.

Alicia promises on her life to keep his secret and tells him that she loves him and she’s gotta be lying but Ray doesn’t even care anymore, and it’s probably an awful idea, but he marries her.

\--

It’s not love he feels toward her, not exactly. It’s something more like gratitude or ceaseless wonder that of all the billions of people on this planet, it’s him that she wants to stick around in spite of who he is. Because Ray’s not a good person, is he, he was probably born cursed by evil.

 _No_ , she explains, as she lies in bed next to him and traces her nimble fingers over the raised scars on his belly. _I think … being a good person is just like being good at riding a bike or painting or something. It’s a goal you can work toward. Like a path you pick, or something. Being evil – that’s something you_ let _happen to you._

Kinda like _Star Wars_ , Ray muses. Choosing the light side and dark side and all. She laughs at him. _Sure._   _Yeah. Exactly._

She’s always saying these sorts of infinitely wise things, just like Ken used to do, but the difference is that when Alicia says them, Ray actually believes her. Ray promises her that good will win out in him in the end. She just stares at him blankly, like she can’t imagine that ever not being an option. He thinks that maybe it _is_ love he feels for her after all. 

\--

Seven years after Bruges, Ray’s good luck finally runs out. And for the first time since that fairytale fucking city, he finds himself in a hospital, except this time he’s a visitor. The walls in Alicia’s room are white as fresh snowfall.

He restlessly shuffles through the pamphlets the doctors have given him, an endlessly repeating slideshow of soothing landscape pictures and contact numbers for sexual assault support groups and therapists specializing in helping rape victims.

Ray thinks of Chloe and how she escaped being added to that book of names he keeps in his head. Looks at Alicia, lying there pale as a corpse, her third day in a coma after being beaten half to death, and thinks about how not everyone gets so lucky.

Seven years. He’d gotten complacent. He’d forgotten the give and take of his existence, the universe’s karmic judgment that tormented him by letting him go unscathed while far more deserving people took the punishment meant for him.

He suddenly can’t breathe. He clenches his hands in the starched hospital sheets and vomits all over the grey-checkered floors. Like cobblestone, he thinks, laughs deliriously, and vomits again.

\--

Nine months later, Chad is born. Red hair, pale skin. He looks nothing like Ray, who doesn’t need a fucking paternity test to tell him the obvious because he isn’t _stupid_.

Alicia’s still mostly mute and distant. Ray catches her in the bathroom one morning, contemplatively stroking the blunt edge of his straight razor down her wrist. He promises her right there and then that he’ll love Chad regardless of whose child he is, and he promises that Chad will never be moody or sad or bad at math – and Alicia’s looking at him like he’s unhinged, and maybe he really, really is this time. But it’s a promise he never intends to break. This is the chance he’s been waiting for. Come hell or high water, this is the little boy he’s going to save.

He also promises her that he’s fine, he’s okay, that he'll stay levelheaded and won't do anything dramatic while they sort through this together. This promise, he breaks immediately. He goes to Frank Semyon.

\--

Ray really, really doesn’t want to like Semyon, but he can’t help but be drawn to him.

He hears Ray out with a look of almost paternalistic concern on his face. It almost sickens Ray how solidly _decent_ the man is. He’s compassionate but not pitying, sincere but not mocking, charming but not condescending. He talks with almost childlike idealism about his ambitions for leaving his legacy upon the world, and seems genuinely sorry that the world is the disappointing shithole that it is. Ray listens with some incredulity. He doesn’t know when he’s become more cynical than the fucking crime lord who secretly runs half of South Los Angeles.

Despite his fascination, Ray stays wary. There’s the distinct sense that something sharp and dangerous is coiled up and waiting to kill just beneath Semyon’s charismatic veneer, like a switchblade on a hair trigger. When he looks Ray in the eye and promises to find the fucking scum that’s responsible for what happened to his wife, Ray knows he’s looking into the eyes of the devil himself.

And when Ray shakes Semyon’s hand, he knows he’s damned. He had his second chance, and with that one gesture, he’d thrown it all away. This is the start of his slow descent, but, he supposes, if it’s his immortal soul for the lives of two people infinitely better and more deserving than he could ever hope to be, well. It’s a _more_ than fair trade.

_Is it?_

He poses the question to Ken, but he gets nothing back. Ken always responds, but this time he doesn’t. The silence echoes around his skull, deafening him.

He hunts down his wife’s rapist, kills him slowly, and dumps the body in a grave nobody would ever find. It was nothing like the priest in London, because he thinks he might’ve enjoyed it a little this time.

\--

In a turn of events that reeks of Semyon’s puppeteering, Ray gets promoted to detective in the city of Vinci. To pay off his debts, Ray is bought and leashed as Semyon’s personal attack dog.

 _Listen, you shouldn’t feel too bad about this_ , Semyon says, perhaps anticipating that Ray would have to be convinced into doing these things. _These guys have it coming to them._

Ray snorts derisively. Harry Waters had said the same thing about the priest almost a decade ago. He tells Semyon to fuck right off, or had he forgotten what Ray used to do for a living before becoming the upstanding pillar of the community he is today. To his credit, Semyon just laughs and claps him on the shoulder.

It should worry Ray how easily he slips back into old ways – brass knuckles and ski masks and leaving marks where they don’t show – but that nagging apprehension is nothing that a shot or nine of cheap whiskey can’t fix. It’s just one of several new habits he picks up.

Others include: smoking too much, crushing paranoia, complete lack of empathy, and threatening sadistic twelve-year-old cunts with anatomically improbable acts involving their parents’ dead corpses.

He grows to realize that Alicia was wrong about a lot of things. Firstly, all that stuff she’d said about good and evil was bullshit – because he wasn’t just letting evil happen to him, he was _being_ evil, but it was all in the name of _doing_ good for her and Chad – and where did that leave the scales of judgment?

Secondly, she _had_ lied about loving him after all, because nine years into his tenure as Semyon’s bent cop, she leaves him for a fuck named Richard Brune. She calls him when the divorce is finalized.

Doesn’t matter, he spits into the phone. At least I still have Chad _._ And then he hangs up, takes three deep hits from his flask, puts his mask and gloves on, and gets ready to beat the everloving shit out of another one of the unlucky bastards Semyon’s sicced him on.

Jesus fuck, what am I doing, Ray doesn’t ask himself, because firstly, he knows the answer, and secondly, he doesn’t want to admit that he knows the answer. Bruges was so much easier than this.

\--

Twelve years into this hollow excuse for an existence, Ray ends up in a picnic area on a deserted stretch of the PCH at three in the morning.

He’s not alone – county and state law enforcement have congregated like buzzards on roadkill. Uniformed officers mill around in a frenzy, looking like nightmarish, deformed shadows under the flickering red and blue lights of the cruisers. Ray’s flanked by a grim-looking highway patrol officer and a hard-eyed knife-toting county detective. Woodrugh, Bezzerides, nice to meet you, blah blah blah. Hell is other people.

The pasty-skinned corpse sitting at the picnic table looks half-mummified. He’s got burned-out eyes and a gaping hole in his hip.

Long after motorcycle cop and the knife nut have drifted off to squabble about jurisdictional rights, Ray still can’t stop staring at the corpse that stares balefully back out of the two charred craters in its face. It’s a familiar tableau, Ray thinks, Bosch couldn’t have done better if he’d tried _._

\--

After Alicia finally confronts him at the shopping mall, he doesn’t have Chad anymore either. It was an inevitable conclusion, he supposes, and he finally accepts what he’s known for a long time: that to save this kid, he’d have to give him up. So he gives up without a fight.

With Alicia gone, Semyon’s now maybe the closest thing Ray has to friend or family – or at least the only person left in his life who knows about Bruges. In a moment of weakness, Ray tells him how tired he’s been feeling. The kind of tired that staying in bed for three days straight or going on a week-long bender can’t fix. 

He tells Semyon that he was in Los Angeles because he had to get away from Bruges, and London hadn’t been far away enough. But now, Los Angeles isn’t far enough, either. Ray’s starting to think there’s only one place he can go now where he can find some peace, but it’s a one-way trip and even after twenty years, he’s still afraid of what he’s going to find when he arrives.

Semyon picks up on his insinuation and forbids him from ever even thinking such a thing again.

Fine, Ray agrees. What the fuck ever. What did it even matter anymore. What did anything matter anymore.

Apparently satisfied, Semyon sends Ray to investigate Caspere’s second apartment, and that’s when that creepy crow-masked fucker comes out of nowhere with a twelve-gauge rifle.

\--

And lying on the ground with two shotgun shells worth of buckshot in his belly, he feels cold again. The kind of cold he hadn’t felt since he’d been laid out face-down on the snowy cobblestone streets of that fairytale fucking city, with the freezing fog descending upon him. To warm himself up, he thinks about the relentless desert sun, blistering pavement, and eternally blue skies, but that vision turns into a hellscape of shifting sands and boiling black tar.

He sees the faces of the dead dancing before him again, as vividly as if the past twenty years had never happened and he was still in that hospital bed in Bruges. Jimmy the dwarf. Ken. Harry Waters. That priest who had it coming. The little boy, still nameless after all these years. Grinning above them all like the fucking angel of death itself is Caspere’s eyeless corpse, frozen in a rictus of twisted delight. 

This is it. Ray knows he’s delayed the inevitable long enough. And suddenly, an almost holy revelation dawns on him: he’s not afraid of going to that furthest place anymore. He knows that waiting for him there will be each and every person in his book of names, and whatever happens to him there is going to happen. Hell is other people, and it's fine. It’s all right. He welcomes their judgment. He’s not afraid. He just wants it all to be over.

And he really, really hopes this is the end.

Really, really hopes this is the end.

**Author's Note:**

> THIS WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS LONG JESUS EFF. 
> 
> apologies for pretention, melodrama, and overuse of the en-dash. let me know if anything’s off, narratively, grammatically, spiritually, etc. hope you enjoyed! ☺


End file.
